My parents went home to New York. Liesl and I eventually went back to work. For months, we barely spoke. We couldn’t even touch each other. Part of it was exhaustion, but we were also ashamed: of our mutual failure, of the unfair but unshakable feeling that each of us could have done better, that the other person hadn’t quite risen to the occasion. A year after Jacob died, we had our first conversation about whether we should have another child, and although it began politely, it ended awfully, in recriminations: about how I had never wanted Jacob in the first place, about how she had never wanted him, about how I had failed, about how she had. We stopped talking; we apologized. We tried again. But every discussion ended the same way. They were not conversations from which it was possible to recover, and eventually, we separated.
It amazes me now how thoroughly we stopped communicating. The divorce was very clean, very easy—perhaps too clean, too easy. It made me wonder what had brought us together before Jacob—had we not had him, how and for what would we have stayed together? It was only later that I was able to remember why I had loved Liesl, what I had seen and admired in her. But at the time, we were like two people who’d had a single mission, difficult and draining, and now the mission was over, and it was time for us to part and return to our regular lives.
For many years, we didn’t speak—not out of acrimony, but out of something else. She moved to Portland. Shortly after I met Julia, I ran into Sally—she had moved as well, to Los Angeles—who was in town visiting her parents and who told me that Liesl had remarried. I told Sally to send her my best, and Sally said she would.
Sometimes I would look her up: she was teaching at the medical school at the University of Oregon. Once I had a student who looked so much like what we had always imagined Jacob would look like that I nearly called her. But I never did.
And then, one day, she called me. It had been sixteen years. She was in town for a conference, and asked if I wanted to have lunch. It was strange, both foreign and instantly familiar, to hear her voice again, that voice with which I’d had thousands of conversations, about things both important and mundane. That voice I had heard sing to Jacob as he juddered in her arms, that voice I had heard say “This is the best one yet!” as she took a picture of the day’s tower of blocks.
We met at a restaurant near the medical college’s campus that had specialized in what it had called “upscale hummus” when she was a resident and which we had considered a special treat. Now it was a place that specialized in artisanal meatballs, but it still smelled, interestingly, of hummus.
We saw each other; she looked as I had remembered her. We hugged and sat. For a while we spoke of work, of Sally and her new girlfriend, of Laurence and Gillian. She told me about her husband, an epidemiologist, and I told her about Julia. She’d had another child, a girl, when she was forty-three. She showed me a picture. She was beautiful, the girl, and looked just like Liesl. I told her so, and she smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Did you ever have another?”
I did, I said. I had just adopted one of my former students. I could see she was surprised, but she smiled, and congratulated me, and asked me about him, and how it had happened, and I told her.
“That’s great, Harold,” she said, after I’d finished. And then, “You love him a lot.”
“I do,” I said.
I would like to tell you that it was the beginning of a sort of second-stage friendship for us, that we stayed in touch and that every year, we would talk about Jacob, what he could have been. But it wasn’t, though not in a bad way. I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so unnerved me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and that she too had had students—or had simply passed young men in the street—whom she thought she recognized from somewhere, only to realize later that she had imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been searching for him all this time.
I hugged her goodbye; I wished her well. I told her I cared about her. She said all the same things. Neither of us offered to stay in touch with the other; both of us, I like to think, had too much respect for the other to do so.
But over the years, at odd moments, I would hear from her. I would get an e-mail that read only “Another sighting,” and I would know what she meant, because I sent her those e-mails, too: “Harvard Square, appx 25-y-o, 6′2″, skinny, reeking of pot.” When her daughter graduated from college, she sent me an announcement, and then another for her daughter’s wedding, and a third when her first grandchild was born.
I love Julia. She was a scientist too, but she was always so different from Liesl—cheery where Liesl was composed, expressive where Liesl was interior, innocent in her delights and enthusiasms. But as much as I love her, for many years a part of me couldn’t stop feeling that I had something deeper, something more profound with Liesl. We had made someone together, and we had watched him die together. Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.
After Julia and I decided we were going to adopt him, about six months before we actually asked him, I told Laurence. I knew Laurence liked him a great deal, and respected him, and thought he was good for me, and I also knew that Laurence—being Laurence—would be wary.
He was. We had a long talk. “You know how much I like him,” he said, “but really, Harold, how much do you actually know about this kid?”
“Not much,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t Laurence’s worst possible scenario: I knew he wasn’t a thief, that he wasn’t going to come kill me and Julia in our bed at night. Laurence knew this, too.